Lilith stepped away from the robes and stood before them pale as bone. Clad simply, she exuded that same mixture of fragility and power, eroticism and fierceness, that Eligor had felt the first time he met her.
Sargatanas knelt, followed by the other demons around him. “Consort Lilith—” he began.
“Consort no longer, my lord,” Lilith corrected, the words tinged with the barest trace of triumph. “Rise, Sargatanas. I no longer hold any position of rank in Hell. My being here should tell you that.”
“Lilith,” the Demon Major said, once more standing. The others around him rose and, with bows, began to descend the flight of steps and cross the broad floor. “I did not think you were ready yet to be out and about in Adamantinarx. When Valefar told me of your arrival I expected that you would want to remain hidden until the unrest with Dis was resolved.”
“True It does not yet know of my whereabouts, though It probably suspects the truth. If I may say, there is no point to my remaining in hiding, my lord. Your power and your disregard for Beelzebub’s orders have made your case plain enough to Dis; the Fly’s regard for you is already deeply questionable—”
“And will surely become more so when he discovers that you, his Consort, are residing within this city’s walls.”
“Would you have me return, then? To Dis?”
“No, my lady, never. But I will have to impose serious, personal safeguards upon you.”
“Thank you, my lord.”
Eligor’s eye met Valefar’s; the Captain of the Flying Guard had lingered as much from the lack of his lord’s orders as from his own fascination with Lilith. But now, with a meaningful nod from Valefar, Eligor turned and followed the Prime Minster as he began to descend the stairs. Valefar stooped and picked up Lilith’s skins, folding them as he walked. Minutes later, at the entrance to the arcades, Eligor turned back and saw the two distant figures deep in conversation.
* * * * *
Lilith watched Sargatanas walk to the edge of the dais and sit down upon the pyramid’s top step. His smoldering dark form contrasted sharply with the pale stones, the many ebon and red folds of his robes fanning out behind him. He seemed weary, cocking his head slightly as he looked at the distant, melted statue. “Very impressive, that,” said Lilith.
“Yes,” the demon said diffidently after a pause. “Just another tool for me to use against your former lord when the need arises. Please,” he said, beckoning Lilith to sit next to him. She sat and delicately arranged the folds of her long, sheathlike skirt.
Sargatanas turned away from the darkening chamber and looked at her for a moment without saying anything, studying her small movements. His carefully composed court face was expressionless, but Lilith thought she saw, implicit beneath the slowly sliding plates a mixture of emotions. Is it melancholia? As they regarded each other she saw his expression change, saw the plates cease moving, the tight set of his jaw lighten.
“So why did you leave Dis?” he said. “And then come here?”
Lilith looked away and for an instant she imagined that her vision cut through the palace’s stone walls, darting across the umber landscape all the way back to the Keep and her abandoned chambers. It was so odd that she would never see them again; she had spent so long within its confines. So long a prisoner.
“It’s actually very simple, my lord…. I cannot be… owned. It is how I was made.”
“Cannot… or will not?”
“Both.” The word hung in the air. “When Lucifer passed on his scepter to Beelzebub, when I became a bargaining chip in the transaction between them, I felt hurt, disgusted, outraged. But after all those millennia with that thing, I felt scooped out, bereft of my… self. The Fly took away nearly everything that I was. That is Its way. And then, after so very long, the tiny part of me that I kept locked away… the part that could imagine the Light… saw a possible way: the souls. If I could give them hope and nurture it, then maybe they could become themselves again and by weight of numbers overthrow the Fly. Perhaps it was naive, but I secretly began to send out my little statues, sowing them among the damned. They became my surrogates for freedom and salvation… and revenge.”
He nodded gravely. “That answers why. But not what made you come here.”
“I… suffered a great loss.” She paused. There would be a time to tell him about Ardat, about just how much she meant to her, but not now. “My lord, do you know what the demons in Dis call Adamantinarx? With slitted eyes and filled with hate they call it the ‘City That Fell from Heaven.’ Everyone there knows what it represents… that it is the best that one can find in Hell. Everyone, too, knows of its lord and how he rules that city.”
Lilith knew well the other reason she had chosen Adamantinarx, knew that she could not yet tell him that she had seen in his infrequent visits to Dis something in him that had reminded her of another demon—her lost lord. Sargatanas bore many of the same irresistible qualities that had made Lucifer the force he was: the ambition, the idealism, the ferocity. And now she had seen yet another similar side, the self-flagellating remorse.
“From what I have heard,” he rumbled, “they spit after they utter that. And not just because they say the word ‘Heaven.’ Everyone may know of Adamantinarx, but not everyone wants it to exist.”
“True, but I do. And I would call it home. I can never see Heaven; this is as close as I can come.”
“And just how did you make your journey? Valefar never told me.”
“Anonymously, alone, and upon the back of a beast. Prime Minister Agares had a hand in it. He is a strange one, my lord. On the surface dutiful, but beneath he is in great turmoil, I think. Were I the Fly I would not put too much trust in his allegiances.”
“Interesting. I cannot imagine being in proximity to the Fly each and every day and not being a willing vassal. It would destroy a lesser demon. Well, Lilith,” Sargatanas said, extending his hand, “you are welcome in the City That Fell from Heaven and as long as you stay here I will protect you with my last phalangite if need be.”
Lilith put her hand—so white and small compared to his—upon his upturned palm, feeling the heat of it spreading. She shuddered as an unfamiliar sensation spread throughout her, a clawing away of the fear and misery that was such a large part of her being. Trapped beneath the millennia-deep sediment of her torment and resentment lay a pearlescent sealed casket and, within it, that imagined, barely fluttering self that Lilith knew had been deeply buried since she had arrived.
She looked down, shaking her head slightly.
“What is it?” Sargatanas asked softly.
“I… I feel as if I am either dreaming or awakening.”
The demon lord rose and, still cupping her hand in his, drew her up.
“It cannot be a dream, Lilith. My dreams are never this… engaging.”
Lilith smiled, closed her eyes for a moment, and felt as if her soul, like a dock of winged night-silvers, had risen, released at last, from within that now-open box.
Chapter Nineteen
DIS
The Keep was more silent than Adramalik had ever remembered it. What few functionaries he saw in its corridors and rooms bore the unmistakable mark of terror upon their faces. Tales were beginning to filter up from its base, tales of what had happened out in the city’s Sixtieth Ward after the Prince had finally resigned himself to the fact that his Consort was no longer in Dis. What Adramalik heard made even him shudder.
He had been present when the Prince had finally come to the dark conclusion that Lilith was gone. Adramalik and Agares and a few other principals had, at first, stood rooted to the floor with mouths agape when Beelzebub’s howling rage had manifested itself. Tiny flies, growing in size, had peeled away from his body in a seemingly unending, rising spiral, horrific to behold. And their faces, faces that he knew to have once belonged to angels, were pocked and distorted, torn and twisted, sublime in their madness. Each bloated fly was different from its brother, but each bore many limbs that ended in black blades tha
t snapped and cut the air as the creatures, enlarging as they flew, jostled toward the Rotunda’s openings and flooded forth into the dark skies of Dis. Relief spread through Adramalik’s shaking body as he watched them depart; for a moment he had actually wondered if Beelzebub’s rage might spill over onto him and Agares and indeed everyone in the Keep. But in a few short minutes the small gathering was standing alone in the quiet Rotunda, left wide-eyed and trembling, watching the frantic swaying of the skins above. Adramalik could not remember when his master had left the Keep last.
Even now he could hear, in the fearful silence that smothered the Keep, the echo of the whir of their wings and the sound their clattering bodies made, and a part of him held his breath in awe.
A day later, after the Prince had resumed his throne, someone had ventured into the Sixtieth Ward and come back to the Keep with a tale of what he had seen there. It was a large precinct, but, even so, nothing had been spared.
Souls, demons, buildings, even the very streets had been shredded, chopped, and ultimately defiled. Squashed hummocks of body parts stood in the plazas, misshapen islands in expanding lakes of blood. The stench of tens of thousands of rotting, half-consumed bodies, of buildings chewed and vomited up and stinking feces from the ensuing feast, had been overpowering even by hellish standards. And over the entire ward a fog of blood hung so thick that it made the carnage all the worse for its gradually revealed butcheries. The fog blanketed the ward for a few days and then it moved, by either command or the caprices of the infernal zephyrs, off toward the Wastes to ultimately descend, he had heard, upon Adamantinarx. Adramalik did not agree with those who rationalized it as a natural event; he knew his Prince too well and knew that he had every reason to suspect where his Consort had fled to. The fog was a warning. But, Adramalik pondered, how had she so easily managed to leave Dis unseen and unquestioned? This was something he needed to find out.
Now keeping to himself, alternately pacing and sitting at his desk in his chambers, he felt no sense of comfort, even surrounded as he was by his loyal Knights. They, too, knew that venturing forth might provoke the dark figure who sat so nearby upon his charnel throne, wrapped in black hatred and paranoia. It was a time to measure one’s appearances, a time to be careful.
ADAMANTINARX-UPON-THE-ACHERON
Lilith entered the arcade and passed a dozen ambassadors as they exited the main chamber. She was becoming a regular visitor, and none of the guards she stepped past challenged or even questioned her. Her freedom, a balm to her, was that complete.
Counter to her fears, her sense of awakening had not, in any way, diminished as she shared more and more time with Sargatanas. When he wasn’t holding councils with Valefar and Eligor and the others he would walk the streets of Adamantinarx with her, and gradually she came to realize that they were both enjoying and looking forward to their meetings. Frequently their conversations centered upon the souls, and her philosophies of tolerance toward them, and Sargatanas, to her delight, seemed receptive. She saw him for short periods only, as he was consumed with the affairs of his great city, but the encounters were growing pleasantly, uncharacteristically, relaxed. The huge demon’s tone was less tense, less filled with the edge of pain that she remembered from so long ago, which was even more exceptional given the imminence of conflict that loomed over the city. She had to attribute it to her presence, a fact that made her smile when she was back in her chambers.
Lilith entered the Audience Chamber and saw that it was suffused with a light miasma of smoke that hung like a gently shifting veil softening the finger of ruddy light that dropped from above. A flock of silver-black Abyssals circled the inner dome on distance-muffled wings, disappearing in its shadows, briefly glittering in the light like coins thrown into the air. Looking toward the throne, she saw Sargatanas seated and flanked by Valefar and some ambassadors, and she felt more protected than she would have ever imagined before. She had to admit that, despite her independent inner self, she liked the feeling.
Arriving at the pyramid’s foot, she waited as Sargatanas disengaged himself and descended the long stairs and she wondered, not for the first time, where today’s special destination, only hinted at by his messenger, would be. Just in case, she carried her traveling skins. The city’s sights had been amazing: the mammoth, incandescent Forges, the vast artisans district, the seemingly endless Armory, the organized and efficient Abyssal husbandry pens. But while these had all been impressive locations, it was the enormous Library within the palace itself that sparked her imagination. She could not yet read the ornate script, but Sargatanas himself had promised to teach her and, most intriguingly, he had told her that there were a few rich texts that recounted life so long ago in the Above. These, she knew, would prey upon her imagination only until they yielded their contents. On a deeper level, she looked forward to her lessons not only for the knowledge gained but for the shared intimacy as well.
“You can leave those behind,” Sargatanas said, indicating the draped skins that Lilith carried. “Eligor will have them brought back to your chambers.”
“Are we staying in the palace, then?” she said, hoping for the first of her lessons.
“Actually, Lilith, we’re going to be very close to where we stand at the moment.”
“I am intrigued, my lord,” she said, laying the garments down carefully, patting them unconsciously. It worried her only a little to leave them behind.
She and Sargatanas crossed the broad floor, wended their way through the forest of the arcade’s pillars at its periphery, and exited into the great entry hall. Sargatanas led her through the crowd of functionaries that had stopped and knelt in place before their lord. He took her through a tall doorway, passing through a floating guard-glyph, and gradually Lilith became aware that they were slowly descending, corridor by corridor beneath the main floor. At each important juncture they passed through another glyph. Sargatanas led her in silence and as the many branching corridors grew darker and lessened to one, only the sounds of her clawed feet, his deep breathing, and the fires of his head broke the stillness.
Lilith did not care how long the walk through the labyrinthine halls took; it was another adventure with Sargatanas, whose proximity was becoming both reassuring and disturbingly necessary. The novelties of both feelings, the sheer improbability of them, were things she went over frequently and accepted willingly. She had been spiritually in exile for too long.
The corridor’s ceiling rose, and before her she saw a doorway and a bench. Above the lintel was Sargatanas’ seal wrought in flowing silver, inset into the purest white stone, and with a stab of realization Lilith knew that something secret and special lay behind the imposing door.
Sargatanas stopped just as he put his dark hand upon the door’s latch. Lilith watched him pause and counted her heartbeats while he looked down at the flagstones. Some inner conflict was at work upon him, and she thought to reassure him that he did not have to show her what lay beyond. But she said nothing.
The dull thunk of the latch was loud in the otherwise tomblike silence.
A vestibule just behind the door opening led into a much brighter room beyond, and Sargatanas looked up at her, his glittering eyes intense as he carefully watched her expression. He said nothing, but somehow she knew that he wanted her to enter first, and, moving slowly, she stepped past him and over the threshold.
Into Heaven.
As she walked forward Lilith brushed her fingers unconsciously along the wall’s lines of incised script, her wide eyes fixed on the lambent room so unlike anyplace else in all of Hell.
She moved from statue to frieze to mosaic as if she were dreaming, slowly, and with the feeling that she was not within herself. Occasionally, like someone who had been blind for all her existence, she would reach out and, with a delicate finger that rivaled the paleness of the stones around her, lightly trace it across the carved, perfect face of some seraph or up the smooth side of a golden spire or over the jeweled streams that flowed throughout the cities and f
ields.
As she made her way around the room she grew more and more exhilarated, reaching a point of near breathlessness in her eagerness to drink it all in. Sargatanas quietly whispered a running commentary and Lilith attentively listened to every word. She could not understand all of their meanings, but most served to heighten her sense of wonderment. The hosts gathered before her and she could nearly hear their silver voices raised in praise of their Throne’s manifold glories. Strange tears of joy, of unfamiliar exultation, rolled down her cheeks and she felt weak and light-headed. Once, she stumbled and nearly fell, but a strong, dark hand caught her.
When she reached the final frieze the Radiance she saw reflected there, the sheer majesty and beauty of it, overwhelmed her almost as much as her hatred for it, and the room spun before her tear-filled eyes and went dark and she collapsed. She felt Sargatanas scoop her up and place her gently upon a central bier, an unadorned stone platform she was sure he used in some private ceremony.
This is where he is from. This is where he yearns to go back, she thought, staring up at the shimmering opal ceiling. And then a coldness gripped her. This is where I can never go. Nor would I want to. A clawing sadness like none that she had known, not even when Ardat Lili had not come back, washed powerfully through Lilith, replacing the fragile, newborn joy she had felt. I must not let him see this.
But it was too late. Sargatanas leaned concernedly over her, and, like smoke dissipating, she saw him for the first time for what he had been. Perhaps it was the influence of the images she had just seen or how he wanted her to see him. but looking in his eyes she saw the seraph. Not even with Lucifer had she been so sure of anyone’s inner self. There is so much pain and longing in those eyes.
Sargatanas lifted her upright and, hesitating for a moment, ran two fingers through her hair.
Sargatanas paused and Lilith realized that, from that moment on, she would not be able to look at him without seeing that true, angelic core, no matter how awful he made himself.
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